Why It's So Hard to Predict Who Will Snap

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As the alleged shooter in last week's Aurora, Colo., movie
theater killings made his first appearance in court, his every
facial tic was scrutinized for clues as to why he might have
launched his attack against theater-goers at a midnight showing
of the newest Batman movie last week.

But even if James Holmes eventually reveals his motives,
psychologists say, the answers are unlikely to be satisfactory.

"Even when you pull the pieces together, they
really don't add up," said Mary Muscari, a forensic nurse at
Binghamton University in New York who has researched mass
killers. The histories of mass shooters sometimes show common
threads, such as a series of disappointments leading up to the
event, Muscari said. But in the end, the spark that drives people
to violence is unknown, and the events are rare enough that it's
hard to generalize from case to case.

"There are certainly a lot of people who have a lot of things go
wrong, and they're not committing mass murders," Muscari told
LiveScience. "Even when you look at mental illness, most people
with mental illness are not violent."

Holmes allegedly entered a theater showing the Batman film "The
Dark Knight Rises" shortly after the movie began on July 20.
Dressed in protective gear and bearing tear gas and three guns,
Holmes opened fire on the crowd, killing 12. [ 10 Most
Destructive Human Behaviors ]

Mass killers follow different enough patterns that it's
incredibly difficult for researchers to pin down common threads,
said Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University and the
past president of the American Psychological Association.

"Each one is a recipe with some common ingredients, perhaps, but
then ingredients that differ," Farley told LiveScience. "For
example, many are white males between 20 and 30. On the other
hand, there are millions of such males in this country."

And there are exceptions to every trend. Seung-Hui Cho, who
killed 32 during a
shooting rampage at Virginia Tech in 2007, was of Korean
descent. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of the
Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo., were 18 and
17 years old, respectively. In a relatively rare case of a female
perpetrator, University of Alabama, Huntsville professor Amy
Bishop has been charged with killing three and injuring three
more during a workplace shooting in 2010.

Mass killers can target strangers, coworkers or family members,
Muscari said. A common motive is revenge, she added.

"Revenge is a fluid thing," Muscari said. "It could be something
very specific against a certain person, it could be a general
thing in the workplace or school, or it could be very diffuse,
where they go shoot up a restaurant."

Mass killers are often portrayed as
socially isolated loners, but that's not quite accurate, said
Katherine Newman, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who
has studied high-school and university shootings.

"In fact, they are very rarely loners," Newman said. "After the
fact, when you interview people who knew them, they'll say, 'He
had friends. I was one of his friends.' But in general, their
social experience is not one of easy incorporation."

In other words, many mass shooters, rather than wanting to be
alone, have a history of struggling to connect. They experience
rejection by their peers or they draw back from potential
friendships, assuming they'll be rejected if they try. They
believe they're perceived as insignificant, Newman told
LiveScience.

"They want to be seen as notorious, and unfortunately, there's a
lot of social reinforcement for the glamour of being notorious,"
she said. "They imagine how cool it will be when everybody knows
their name … I know this sounds absurd, but in some ways,
revulsion or notoriety is preferable from their point of view
from anonymous and insignificant." [ 10
Surprising Facts About the Teen Brain ]

Extreme events

But even here, the psychology of mass killers remains evasive.
Plenty of people struggle with friendships, Newman said, and only
a "tiny, tiny infinitesimal fraction of them [does] something
like this."

As soberingly frequent as mass shootings may seem, they're
extremely rare from a scientific perspective, researchers said.
There has been a gradual increase in multiple-victim homicides,
though the statistics are still low: 3.1 percent of murders in
1976 and 4.4 percent in 2005, according to the Bureau of Justice
Statistics. That statistic includes all homicides with multiple
victims, not only sprees like that in Aurora.

The larger the group of people psychologists can study, the more
they can delve into causes of behavior, and the more sure they
can be of their results. Mass killers just aren't very common.

Compounding the problem, Farley said, is that most psychological
tests and theories are based on more or less normal psychology.
It's a paradigm that can explain things like happiness,
depression and anxiety, but it doesn't work as well when faced
with extreme cases, he said. [ Top
10 Controversial Psychiatric Disorders ]

"I worry that we may not even be able to get a good fix, in a
sense, on his mental health status," Farley said of Holmes.
"There just aren't enough reference points."

Though little information has been released on Holmes' mental
health, Farley said he'd be surprised to find out that the
alleged shooter was psychotic,
given the months of planning that went into his spree.

Calling for prevention

Farley and others contacted by LiveScience could only speculate
on Holmes' motives, given the scant information available about
the case. There have been shootings in the past by struggling
graduate students, Farley said, citing a 1991 murder-suicide at
the University of Iowa in which a friend of Farley's along with
four other professors were killed. The pressure of living up to
expectations in graduate school can be very stressful, Newman
said, potentially exacerbating violent tendencies.

There are other questions to ask as well, Farley said, from how
socially isolated Holmes was to why he may have developed a focus
on the Batman franchise, dying his hair a Joker-like shade of red
(Batman merchandise was also found in Holmes' apartment).

Psychologists interviewed for this story agreed that the pressing
problem is to find a way to prevent these
killing sprees before they happen. Even in people who will
never snap, the problems of social isolation and feelings of
insignificance are terrible burdens, Newman said.

"It's not so much to catch shooters, because we know that's very
difficult, but actually to address very widespread problems that
reach millions of kids," she said.

Though the U.S. homicide rate has dropped in the last decade or
so in the U.S., psychology should also focus more on less
headline-grabbing
violence, Farley said, arguing for a concerted effort to
study what he called the "heart of darkness" in humanity.